Adding web designer credits to properties I create

[studio35design]

I’m a web designer and I add a “design by studio 35 “ link on the footer of all the web sites I design. By doing so, every page on a website links to me, since the sites I build can have anywhere from 10 to 100 pages (wordpress and shopify).

While this does on occasion get me clients and inquiries, is this affecting the SEO to my site in a good, or in a bad way? Non of the sites are spammy, but many of them have low domain authority since they are typical small businesses and organizations and do no SEO efforts.

Would it be better to add a "site credits" link to a page within a client site, and there add a bit of info and link out? That way, there is only 1 link back to my site?

[benjaminmarcinc]

I struggle with this too, on the one hand we get referral business from these links but on wmt it shows some sites may have 2000 pages and that can't look good in a search engines eyes. Im cleaning my site up now and in web master tools i had so many pages linking to me from sites that i have done over the years and i think it might be hurting me. I recently started putting no follow links on a lot of the sites that i have built so that potential clients can get to my site but search engines won't crawl them. Hope this helps.

[kwoolf]

Funny I just looked this up today trying to help someone here. Basically, you're adding a backlink to your site and I can't find any information to get you a solid answer. In general, you need to consider any link's relevance, reputation, and trust. so if a backlink isn't relevant to the site, will it get flagged as an ad? Might webmaster backlinks be considered paid links?

I did find this Matt Cutts video on footer links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0fgh5RIHdE and it seems Google can weigh footer links and editorial links differently, and I think that's your answer. But I also came across this article http://blog.ahrefs.com/matt-cutts-says-google-cracking-bloggers-bribed-links/ that's says Google is basically cracking down on the kind of links you're describing.

But at the end of the day, are you getting a significant CTR from these links? If that's the case, nofollow those links and perhaps Google might actually counts them more. Who really knows?

[CleverPhD]

Add the links if you feel you will get referral business from it, but not for SEO value.  The link(s) you do add, no follow them.   Duane Forrester from Bing stated in a blog post "You want links to surprise you. You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from."

http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2014/05/09/10-seo-myths-reviewed.aspx

This statement was given the general nod by Matt Cutts of Google

https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/466449897261367296

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-advance-links-18549.html

Finally, I would ask, can you do this in a way that is also beneficial to your client?  Is the client getting a discount?  Is there a way you can talk about the services this client provides on your site?  Can the two of you as local businesses provide additional information to your visitors (more than just the link) that could turn visitors into customers?

Good luck!

[DeanAndrews]

The Rules of Link Building - Whiteboard Friday posted on April 4th, 2014 which advises against this:

Don't link externally in the footer
A couple of other rules that I see people violate all the time that Google has made painfully clear in the past few months: Don't link externally in the footer. Just don't. I'm not going to go into the reasons. Just don't do that.

And

Avoid site-wide links
By the same token, except for navigation, avoid site-wide links. This is something that we've known for years. If someone links to you externally, site-wide, in the side bar, that's ripe for Penguin-style links.

[studio35design]

Hi Dean. What about if those footer links and those site-wide links are no follow? Won't they just be ignored by google?

[KevinBudzynski]

May be not ignored, but certainly do not pass any search engine ranking value.

[studio35design]

Reason is that there is a real, legitimate value as a developer to have my credit there for users that see the site and would like inquire about having design a similar site. I'm just looking for a way though that this won't affect my own site negatively.

I'm thinking either 1. Do a NoFollow link directly to the site, or 2. Point the link to an internal page on the client site, and from there point to my own site.